State-of-the-art Web browsers allow a user to dynamically link to (view) other Web pages from a presently-viewed page by selecting and activating (clicking on) hypertext tags of those other pages which are embedded in the presently-viewed page. The creator of these pages often allows a user to link to any individual page via a plurality of different paths. For example, tags embedded in a "home page" may allow a user to directly link to "page 1", "page 2", and "page 3", while a tag embedded in "page 1" may allow the user to link to "page 2" and a tag embedded in "page 2" may allow the user to link to "page 3". In other words, the pages in this example may be viewed either randomly or sequentially. For sequential viewing, a "Next Page" tag is often employed, as opposed to a tag that explicitly and uniquely specifies a particular page.
A disadvantage of using the "Next Page" tag becomes apparent when the user has already linked to (viewed) one or more of the sequential pages in a non-sequential manner--for example, if the user has already linked directly to "page 2" from the "home page", but now clicks on the "Next Page" tag in "page 1". The disadvantage is that clicking on the "Next Page" tag will link the user to a page which he or she has already viewed ("page 2"), whereas what the user really desires is to be linked to the next page that he or she has not yet viewed ("page 3").
Existing systems usually will highlight a tag linking to a page that has already been viewed by the user in order to indicate to the user that he or she has already viewed that page. But this indication is purely informational and does not prevent redundancy of page viewing from occurring. Existing systems do not allow the user to skip a "next page" dynamically, based upon whether or not the user has already viewed that page.